PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

Doctor wins patient records privacy case

Magellan disputes the finding that a psychiatrist was fired because he didn't provide patient-identifying information.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. April 21, 2003.

When a health plan asked Daniel S. Shrager, MD, for five patient records so it could perform a quality review, the Pittsburgh psychiatrist decided he'd had it with requests that invaded the physician-patient relationship.

He said he had watched health plans creep further and further into his patient records during his 30 years of practice and he believed it was time to make a point: Patient privacy needs come first.

He embarked on what would turn into a more than two-year legal battle and is happy with the outcome of the case. In March, a Pennsylvania court ruled that the physician was wrongly terminated from the plan after he refused to provide records that included information that identified his patients.

"In my mind, I was fighting for all of psychiatry and all of medicine," said Dr. Shrager, who sued the health plan that asked for the records. "I'm stubborn. I don't quit."

The health plan, Magellan Behavioral Health, disagrees with the court's finding. Magellan attorney Michael McQuillen said Dr. Shrager had not been terminated because he refused to give the company records that included identifiable patient information. Instead, he said, Dr. Shrager was terminated after he refused to provide records that had the identifiable information redacted.

"What we're asking for is very limited information," McQuillen said. "The blinding of records has never been an issue for us. We understand the importance of that."

The March court ruling came from the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court and directly applies only to physicians in that Pennsylvania county.

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